Meeker Massacre forced Utes from most of Colorado, but the attack was a backlash

Nathan Meeker was meant for greatness. Failure kept getting in the way. A run from shame and a mountain of debt drove him into the White River Valley in 1878 to manage the mountain Utes, so that Meeker, the man who founded the plains town of Greeley, could pay off the daughters of the man who gave the town its name. And after being kicked down and kicked down by disappointment, a man can push too hard if he thinks his chances have run out.

[/media-credit] Nathan Meeker, the founder of Greeley and first publisher of the Greeley Tribune, had hoped to turn mountain Utes into farmers in 1879, but inflamed relations and became a victim to the Meeker Massacre.

Because of that, Nathan Meeker. in his final attempt at immortality, sealed his place in American history. The Meeker Massacre — America’s last major Indian uprising — and provided a violent context to force most of the Utes from Coloado onto reservations in Utah and 12 million acres for settlement, mining and safer passage.

The massacre occurred three miles west of the Rio Blanco County seat that today bears Meeker’s name. He and 11 of his men were slaughtered by Utes there, as the Indian agency was torn to pieces. Meeker’s wife and daughter, along with other women from the outpost, were taken hostage.

Born in Ohio, Meeker was a 52 years old in 1869 when he came west, giving up his job as agriculture editor of the New York Tribune four years after its publisher, Horace Greeley, wrote an editorial popularizing the quote, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country.”

[Denver Public Library Western History Collection]
A sketch of the Meeker tragedy at the White River Ute Indian Agency on Sept. 29 1879, after Utes destroyed the agency, slaughtered the white men and took women and children hostage. The massacre is one of the United States’ last major Indian uprising.

With Greeley’s financial and editorial support, Meeker lured 700 share-holding settlers to the Union Colony, a Utopian religious farming cooperative that showcased the albeit expensive potential for irrigation ditches on the Colorado territory’s arid plains. “Meeker worked tirelessly on the project, but lacked administrative skills,” notes the Denver Public Library, which holds a collection of Meeker’s correspondence from the 1870s. “Although Greeley invested heavily in the colony, Meeker could not make it a financial success.”

When Greeley died by the end of November after losing his wife, control of his newspaper and the presidential election in 1872, his daughters called in loans their father had made to Meeker, about $1,000. Rather than declare bankruptcy for a third time in his life, Meeker, who had little, if any, experience with native Americans, sought an appointment as the Indian agent to the White River Ute reservation in 1878, when he was 61 years old. The job paid $1,500 a year and offered other money-making benefits. His wife, Arvilla, operated the agency store, and their daughter, Rose, became the agency’s school teacher.

Connections, not qualifications, helped Meeker land the appointment as the Indian agent for the Utes at the White River Agency in 1878. He was 61, and it’s believed the Bureau of Indian Affairs granted the request largely because Meeker’s son, Ralph, was a journalist for the New York Herald who had exposed corruption in the bureau and embarrassed the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, who had defeated Greeley in the 1872 presidential race. (Twelve days after his father’s death, Ralph Meeker was appointed a special agent to Colorado by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and paid a $3 per day per diem to come to the state and settle his father’s affairs.)

The Utes saw Nathan Meeker as an authoritarian figure who followed the suffocating presence of white mountain men, miners and settlers who put up fences and poisoned streams that weren’t theirs to spoil. Meeker was determined to leave his mark by turning the Utes from warriors, hunters and gatherers into Christian farmers and cattlemen, despite his naked disdain for them.

“They are savages, having no written language, no traditional history, no poetry, no literature . . . a race without ambition, and also a race deficient in the inherent elements of progress. Vermin abound on their persons,” Meeker wrote in an article published in the American Antiquarian newsletter, an article that helped seal his appointment as Indian agent, according to author Peter R. Decker in in his 2004 book, “The Utes Must Go!”: American Expansion and the Removal of a People.”

Meeker got off to a bad start, locating the agency headquarters in a lush valley along the White River known as Powell Park, a special site to Utes, who had pastured, bred and raced their prized ponies there for generations. But the Utes stubbornly refused to give up hunting and fishing for farming and cattle, despite Meeker denying violators their government food rations, Meeker saw the horse-racing track as a symbol of their defiance and made his last, fatal mistake when he plowed under the track for farm rows in September 1879.

“This argument appears to be the final insult as far as the Indians were concerned, as their ponies were their wealth and they believed the reservation was theirs,” according to the Rio Blanco County Historical Society. “The Utes, were further upset because Meeker sent a telegram to Washington D.C. and they could not get Meeker to tell them the content of the message.”

[Denver Public Library Western History Collection]
Rose Meeker, the daughter of Nathan Meeker, fanned flames against native Americans with a lecture series and letters to newspapers. Her sister, Josephine, her mother and other women from the White River Indian Agency were taken captive and later freed by the Utes.

Meeker’s telegram stated he had been insulted, assaulted and forced out of his home by the Ute Chief Douglas, before he was rescued by his employees. It is not clear whether any of that was true. Nonetheless, Meeker called in the army to deal with the troublemakers (though the approaching army’s intention was to relieve Meeker of command).

Outraged, Chief Douglas and a group of warriors killed Meeker and his men on Sept. 29, 1879. Meeker’s wife and daughters were taken hostage in the war path, and the Utes ambushed Major Thomas Thornburgh and his troops at Milk Creek 25 miles north of Meeker. Thornburgh and nine of his men were killed. The Indians eventually fled when Buffalo Soldiers and hundreds of cavalry from Wyoming arrived and outnumbered them.

In the meantime, peaceful Ute Chief Ouray interceded on the hostages’ behalf and they were surrendered peacefully on Grand Mesa 23 days after the massacre. The Utes’ fate was sealed, however.

Ten weeks after the massacre, Rose Meeker wanted more than land. She wanted bloody vengeance.

And there, in his death, Nathan Meeker managed his most personal failure. He had come west to be a social reformer and a Christian missionary; he opposed capital punishment.

“Now we Colorado people are getting somewhat tired of this farce,” Rose Meeker wrote to in a letter to editor of the Denver Tribune on Dec. 17, 1879. “And we invite the miners, the ‘cow boys’ and all other good people to see to it that these Indians never leave Colorado soil alive by simply putting a rope necktie around the necks of each, which is to fit close and snug, thereby relieving these murderers and their fiends at Washington of any further anxiety.”

The history of Colorado and the West is paved with the failures of Nathan Meeker.